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Dailies and Weeklies In general, I prefer a weekly approach to news, especially a paper with a weekly publishing schedule like The Economist, and confine reading it to one day of the week, typically on a weekend. News outlets that publish on a daily schedule (or worse, hourly) have to publish something everyday, even if it's not important, making it horribly inefficient to consume. At most, you may want to supplement The Economist's weekly coverage with some daily coverage from something like NYT, FT, or WSJ (depending on your line of work and interests). Usually a certain columnist or section will sway your subscription decision. A weekly schedule is preferable also because you can easily supplement it with daily coverage using good aggregators such as: *Techmeme (for tech): http://www.techmeme.com/ *Mediagazer (for media): http://mediagazer.com/ *Memeorandum (for politics): http://www.memeorandum.com/ *Hacker News (for general Silicon Valley water-cooler talk):http://news.ycombinator.com/ *StreetEYE Linkfest (for finance): http://linkfest.com/ *Google News (anything and everything): https://news.google.com/ These aggregators let you mix-and-match and eliminate the problem of being subscribed to only one quality publication. If you're time-pressed anyway, you won't have time to thoroughly read articles. You'll mostly be scanning headlines and only rarely dig down into an item of interest, sort of like scanning a ticker. For the true news minimalists, The Economist's "Politics this week" and "Business this week" are short sections you can read in 5 minutes that will provide a nutshell description of what's happened in the past week. You don't even need to read the rest of the issue. Lastly, we saw in 2012 the emergence of daily briefing sites like Evening Edition and The Brief that compress the news into 3-4 bite-sized paragraphs each evening. You could spend 5 minutes on these at night and catch up on everything else on Sunday. Other attempts to condense the news to only the most vital bits include a few ambitious mobile apps that might be worth checking out. Circa is one such app. Yahoo's new iOS app Yahoo News Digest is another. Also check out the New York Times app NYTNow. Over the years, I've experimented with various hacks to keep informed in the least amount of time possible. The nuggets of wisdom I've gained along the way are below. 'A few guiding principles go a long way' WSJ, FT, NYT, and The Economist are all great publications, and restricting most of your news to one or two of these sources is a wise strategy. The rest of the news-sphere is too cluttered/noisy/expansive to be meaningfully mined. Most "news" is simply link-bait info-porn. A majority of headlines (particularly from blogs) are tailored to catch your attention, even if the content is of little importance. It's information for information's sake. In other words, you could do without it. Learn to just grasp a headline and maybe a few lines down if you absolutely have to. (especially if you're cruising an aggregator). This is what most of today's blogs and news sites are in the business of selling. It's trivial and time-inefficient. Certain philosophies about "catching up with the news" may be destructive.'' ''As already discussed, completely abandon any notions about having to "catch up with the news." There's just too much for it all to be in some way relevant to you, so zero in on the articles that will add to your knowledge about something you are personally invested in. There is a minimal amount every citizen of a democracy should know in order to participate. The rest however is about you. 'Podcasts (usually) aren't efficient' Podcasts can be useful because if they're weekly, you get pre-aggregated, pre-filtered news; BUT they're grossly inefficient because there's too much extraneous commentary that just ends up wasting a bunch of your time; if you're reading instead, you pick the pace and even choose what parts of an article to read; podcasts aren't an ideal solution unless you're in situations where you cannot read the news but can still listen to it (like your commute). 'Weekly digests may be promising' If you have topics you like to keep up with but aren't urgent, the weekly route may be the best. Of course, people have been doing this for over a century by just reading the Sunday edition of their paper, and that's actually not a bad strategy. However, if you're looking to implement this strategy with blogs, you're going to see mixed results. Most blogs don't have a good weekly digest, and if they do, it's just a list of links to the week's top stories, nothing really chewed up and rehashed for an end-of-the-week rundown. Fir an example see:What is the best weekly top tech news digest? 'Time-shifting is a double-edged sword' Time-shifting read-it-later systems are a double-edged sword: they might help you catch up on some more news than you normally would be able to, but they only contribute to info-clutter. The ability to save articles is too easy to abuse and before you know it you'll have saved hundreds or even thousands of pieces. I was a diehard Instapaper user for two years, but I've stopped using it for a while now and couldn't be happier. It wasn't Instapaper itself: I have great respect for the product and developer. It was the whole concept of time-shifting my reading. I've switched to an in-the-moment philosophy 'of reading news. If I don't have time to read something in the moment, I'll just forget about it. The problem with these services is that you're reading list grows into a bottomless pit. You even get a slow, creeping anxiety about how much of your reading list you haven't gotten to. Why go through the torture? If there's something I want to keep more permanently, I'll use a bookmarking solution of some kind (usually just printing-to-PDF on my Mac). If I'm bookmarking something, odds are I'm highlighting it, and that means I need to save it as a PDF anyway to do that. UPDATE: I've been using Instapaper again now because it's simply too convenient to save articles to read later, but I'm again falling victim to saving many more articles than I have time to read. I continue to save-as-PDF those articles that truly matter to me (and ignore Instapaper's favoriting feature). 'Avoid Twitter for general news capture It's just too much to make any meaningful sense out of. If you have a directly relevant, domain-specific Twitter account you follow for updates you must''urgently receive, '''fine'. Everything else: inefficient. If you insist on Twitter, use Lists. Spend some time upfront to build your own lists (collections of Twitter accounts) that will help you zero in on a niche. If you need help, visit: https://support.twitter.com/arti... For example, I've collated a bunch of engineering school accounts into one list so I can always be informed about what our brightest minds are working on. It's publicly available here: @sinansays/Engineering 'Best part: '''you don't have to follow who you add to lists, making your main feed even cleaner. UPDATE: I don't really check my Twitter Lists anymore and I now generally use Twitter for spontaneous web surfing, like using StumbleUpon. I still think it's ludicrous to rely on the service as a routinized news channel. No News is Good News As parting advice, I want to draw attention to the late Aaron Swartz (activist)'s philosophy on news. In a blog post entitled "I Hate the News," he argues that following the news is an unhealthy waste of time: The curious thing news is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly ... It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.Occasionally you’ll come across some story that will lead you to actually change what you’ve been working on. But really, how plausible is this? Most people’s major life changes don’t come from reading an article in the newspaper; they come from reading longer-form essays or thoughtful books, which are much more convincing and detailed.Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day. While medical research is yet to fully support this claim, it seems plausible that consuming news may be detrimental to our mental state, making us more fearful, aggressive, and paranoid. It might also hinder our ability to think deeply and creatively. In most cases, information truly worth absorbing--information that would meaningfully impact our lives through our ability to live happily, or generate more income, or whatever--is rarely going to come in the form of "news." I'll end with this final quote from Henry David Thoreau's ''Walden: And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?